I wrote a simple program to analyze rolls after a VASSAL game. Just copy and paste the entire text log from the game (starting from the first roll) into the program, then hit analyze. It will tell you the average rolls of both players, how many rolls were above and below 11 and how many 1s and 20s were rolled.

Yeah, and last night in RL in three triple attacks Jarael rolled 4 or less on 8 of the 9 attacks. The first was literally 4, 4, 4 which is why my opponent and I were commenting on her sobriety or lack thereof.

So until you put in statistical analysis for probable margin of error in small samples it won't convince anyone of anything (and even that likely wouldn't help--math is akin to voodoo to too many people.)

No one really wants to know that it's random. They want to complain based on superstition that it isn't.

Sigh. It's not superstition. I will never forget the night I was playing a vassal game and before each roll I called "high" or "low" before the roll was made. I wasn't correct every time but it was uncanny how accurate my guesses were.

Personally I think the rolls have something to do with the timing of the roll and who is doing the rolling. The numbers, IMO, tend to be more random when one person rolls in succession than when the players alternate.

It's also been my experience that a roll of a 1 by one player is immediately followed by a 20 by the other. Perhaps this is not always the case but often enough that it is more than just "superstition."

Personally I think the rolls have something to do with the timing of the roll and who is doing the rolling.

The way a computer makes a "random" number is to pull the last digit in the millisecond from the system timer, run it through an algorithm that tells it the range (for example, in Vassal it is 1-20, obviously), and then it spits out the number. The computer has to have a seed number to form the "random" number, and the speed of the system timer (the same one that runs your computer's clock) determines the "random" number.

So it is all about the timing of the roll

I knew that degree in Computer Information Systems would come in handy someday....

It's kinda about the timing of the roll, and kinda not. You can't time something perfectly to predict what the roll will be. For example, if you know the next roll will be made at 10:00:00:003 the roll isn't necessarily a 7 or any particular number.

What you can do is take enough roll data, use that to reverse engineer the seed, then reverse-reverse engineer that seed back into the full list and thus "predict" what the entire pattern of numbers will be into the future.

The numbers themselves pass all tests of randomness. It's just that a computer scientist armed with the proper knowledge and tools can figure out how the trick is done to know what the list will be.

Your average computer user cannot. Your average scientist without a computer cannot (in any reasonable time.)

So you can't use it in its pure form for something like cryptography or online gambling where the ability to reverse engineer it would be a security or financial risk. For everything else it's fine.

VASSAL uses Mersenne Twister as its algorithm now. It's generally considered to have random distribution. The criticisms for the method tend to be about efficiency only, and presumably no one here has ever worried about how long it takes for VASSAL to generate the die roll so I think we're good.

The numbers themselves pass all tests of randomness. It's just that a computer scientist armed with the proper knowledge and tools can figure out how the trick is done to know what the list will be.

If I remember correctly, given a large enough data set you can predict what number will come up next, but we're talking data sets in the order of hundreds of billions of precisely tracked random numbers and the exact moment they were generated.

I think I read somewhere that it's actually surprisingly lower than one might expect for Mercene Twister specifically. On the order of 500 rolls. But since no game will ever generate that many, and no one who plays SWM will be likely be able to do the math to figure it out it's rather meaningless.

I would be interested to see the results of a comparison from Vassal to real dice. The timed system must very well have to do with randomness more than anything. Mostly, I think, because the timing would be more regular over a vassal game vs. irl, ie conversation, shaking dice in palm, or even dropping the dice.

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